The Charleston Civil Rights Film Festival, organized by Jon Hale, Associate Professor of Education, Health and Human Performance and author Benjamin Hedin (In Search of the Movement: The Struggle for Civil Rights Then and Now). The festival kicks off tomorrow night (Thursday, April 20) at the American Theatre with a screening of Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre, 1968 (dir. Judy Richardson, 2008). From the festival website: “Showcasing shorts, features, and documentaries, the fest explores the long history of the freedom struggle in America. Sited in a city of rare historic significance, the event also engages with the community to promote new forms of activism. Founded in 2017, the fest promises to be an annual fixture of the Lowcountry calendar.” For more information and the full schedule, click here.

Gius Gargiulo, Professor at Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, will be visiting the College of Charleston. On April 19, he will be giving a lecture entitled “Reframing the Hero in Italian and American Westerns.” Prof. Gargiulo is author of Terrorismes L’Italie et l’Allemagne a l’epreuve des annoys deplo, and Footsophie: Le foot come indentité et fictionnememnt méditatique en Italie etailleurs. The visit is sponsored by the Nuovo Cinema Italiano Film Festival, the Department of French, Francophone, and Italian Studies, and the College of Charleston. The lecture is at 5pm in RSS 235. It is free and open to the public.

The African American Studies Program has been hosting a film festival, and tonight is the festival’s third screening, Black Dynamite (Scott Sanders, 2011), a hilarious send-up of 1970s Blaxploitation films. The festival, “When Bruce Lee Meets Bruce Leroy,” is celebrating the cross-cultural exchange of transnational Asian martial arts films and the 1970s Blaxploitation genre. Tonight’s screening is at 6:30 in ECTR 118. The screening is free and open to the public. The next installment will be Akira Kurosawa’s Jidaigekiclassic Yojimbo (1961) on April 10.

The 2017 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, in Durham, NC, is April 6-9 and tickets are now on sale. For anyone familiar with the festival, the trip up to Durham for a long weekend is well worth it. Check out the schedule here.

The 8th Annual Terrace Charleston Film Festival commences tonight, with screenings of two brilliant films, The Zookeeper’s Wife (dir. Niki Caro, 2017) at 8:00pm and I Am Not Your Negro (dir. Raoul Peck, 2017) at 8:15pm. If you want to see both, don’t worry as there will be repeat screenings. Full a full schedule of the festival events/screenings, click here. The festival runs through Sunday, March 19. The Terrace Theatre is located at 1956D Maybank Highway, James Island.

As part of The Visiting Scholar series, the Film Studies Program and the Department of English are co-hosting Timothy Corrigan, Professor of English, Cinema Studies, and History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous texts including The Film Essay: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford, 2011), A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (Rutgers, 1991), and co-author with Patricia White of The Film Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s), now in its 4th edition. Dr. Corrigan will be giving a talk, entitled “Describing Cinema,” on Monday, March 27 at 5pm in RSS 235. His talk addresses the often overlooked but complicated dynamics of describing scenes, images, sequences can become a wonderfully complicated and rich kind of writing.

Trident Technical College, in association with the South Carolina Film Commission, is hosting a one-day workshop with Martha Pinson, longtime script consultant for Martin Scorsese (on The Aviator, Shutter Island, Hugo), on Saturday, January 28, from 9am to 5pm in the Trident Technical College’s Nursing Auditorium (5000 Rivers Ave., Building 970, North Charleston). The focus of the workshop will be script continuity, an essential aspect of filmmaking, from pre-production to post-production. The event is free and open to the public, but seats are limited so sign up now! For more information and instructions for registration, click here.